(Photo by kenzi)
By WAMU’s Gabe Bullard
Washington businessman Mark Ein is the owner of a brand-new Overwatch team.
What is Overwatch? For those who aren’t among the estimated hundreds of thousands of area players — or the even more numerous fans — Overwatch is a video game that is played competitively and professionally around the world. The new team is the District’s entry into an esports league that’s proven popular enough to be broadcast on ESPN and to fill the 20,000-seat Barclays Center in New York with fans.
The league is run by Overwatch’s developer, Activision Blizzard. The District will be among eight new teams in the league for its second season, bringing the total number of Overwatch teams to 20, representing cities across the U.S. as well as in England, France, South Korea and China. Other Overwatch team owners include Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots and reportedly spent about $20 million on a team for the league’s inaugural season last year.
New teams for the upcoming season are estimated to cost between $30 and $60 million, according to ESPN, but Ein won’t say how much he’s put into the squad. But this isn’t Ein’s, or Washington’s, first investment into professional gaming.
“Esports is the biggest, fastest-growing trend within the sports ecosystem, and so it’s something we’ve been paying attention to for quite a while,” Ein says. “We’ve made small investments previously.”
Ein is among several investors in Team Liquid, an esports organization owned by Ted Leonsis’s Monumental Sports. Events DC, the city’s sports and events authority, has been sponsoring esports events since last year, and established a training facility for Overwatch in the District in February.
“We’ve been on a three-year journey to make esports the focal point,” says Events DC CEO Greg O’Dell, who expects the team and esports competitions in general to be a draw for tourists to Washington.
“Esports, generally, as a market, is growing exponentially, faster than any of the traditional sports,” O’Dell says. “And oddly, some of those traditional sports have seen some decline in their attendance. For that reason, we as a city, and Events DC specifically, have been very bullish on making the investment in this ecosystem to support growing esports in Washington,” O’Dell says.
D.C.’s Overwatch team will have at least eight players. The roster and the name haven’t yet been determined, but will be settled by January, when the new season starts. The team doesn’t yet have a home arena, and won’t have to choose one until 2020. O’Dell says the new 4,200-seat arena in Capitol Heights will be equipped to handle esports (another esports event is planned for November). Ein says he hasn’t decided where the team’s home will be — the team represents the District as well as Maryland and Virginia — but a smaller arena could be the place to start.
“When I was a young kid growing up in Washington, I went to the Baltimore Arena to watch the Baltimore Bullets and I think they were playing in front of six or seven thousand people, so you never know where this goes,” he says.
As for whether an esports team could stand along the Nationals, Capitals, Mystics or Wizards, O’Dell says it’s possible. Ein says the numbers — tens of millions of viewers, hundreds of millions of dollars invested — are “irrefutable.”
“I think you would’ve said a long time ago that it would be inconceivable that people would tune in online to watch people play poker. And we see that,” Ein says. “Probably there’s young people today who couldn’t believe people would watch bowling or even golf, frankly. I like golf, but I just think there’s different tastes and interest for different generations and there’s two billion people on the planet playing video games and they want to watch the best people on the planet playing.”
This story originally appeared on WAMU.
